(E. C. Q.)
(ii). Brythonic. The term Brythonic is used to denote the Celtic dialects of Wales, Brittany and Cornwall. Unlike the Goidels the Brythonic peoples have no common name for their language. Forms of Brythonic speech were doubtless current throughout England and Wales and the Lowlands of Scotland at the time of the Saxon invasion. The S.E. of Britain may have been extensively Romanized, and it is not impossible that remnants of Goidelic speech may have lingered on in out-of-the-way corners. No literary documents dating from this period have been preserved, but some idea of the character of Brythonic may be gathered from the numerous inscriptions which have come to light. In the middle of the 6th century Brythonic was confined to the western half of Britain south of the Clyde and Forth. The colonization of Britannia minor or Armorican Brittany during the 5th and 6th centuries will be described later. In the latter part of the 6th century the W. Saxons pushed their conquests as far as the estuary of the Severn, and from that time the Brythons of S.W. Britain were cut off from their kinsmen in Wales. Early in the 7th century the Brythons of Strathclyde were similarly isolated by the battle of Chester (613). The kingdom of Strathclyde maintained a separate existence until the 10th century, and it is generally stated that Brythonic speech did not die out there until the 12th century. The question as to how far Brythonic names and words have survived in these districts has never been properly investigated. Certain it is that Brythonic numerals survived amongst shepherds in Cumberland, Westmorland and N.W. Yorkshire down to the second half of the 19th century, just as herrings are still counted in Manx by Manx fishermen otherwise quite innocent of the language. Accordingly, from the 7th century onwards Brythonic became gradually limited in Great Britain to three districts—Strathclyde, Wales, and Cornwall and Devon. During the 7th century the Brythons of Wales and Strathclyde often fought side by side against the Angles, and it is from this period that the name by which the Welsh call themselves is supposed to date, Cymro < *Combrox, pl. Cymry < *Combroges, i.e. “fellow-countrymen” as opposed to W. allfro, Gaul. Allobroges, “foreigners.” We have no means of determining when Celtic speech became extinct in the petty states of the north which retained their independence longest.
The chief features which distinguish the Brythonic from the Goidelic dialects have already been enumerated. In the course of the 6th and 7th centuries final short vowels disappeared. In compound names the final vowel remains in the first component until the 7th century. Short vowels in other than initial syllables when immediately preceding the stress (on the historical penultimate) disappear, whilst long ones are shortened, e.g. Welsh cardawt from Lat. caritātem. Other vowels in unstressed position are apt to be reduced, thus ŏ, ŭ, give i in O.W. (Mid. W. y). A marked characteristic of Welsh as distinguished from Cornish and Breton is the treatment of ă under the influence of a following ī. In Welsh the result is ei, in Corn. and Bret. e, e.g. Welsh seint, “saints,” Bret. sent, sing. sant. The mutations seem to have started in the second half of the 6th century in the case of the tenues.
See J. Loth, Les Mots latins dans les langues Brittoniques (Paris, 1892); J. Loth, Chrestomathie bretonne (Paris, 1890).
(a) Welsh (Cymraeg).—It is usual to divide the history of the Welsh language into three periods—Old, Middle and Modern. To the oldest period belong the collections of glosses, the earliest of which go back to about 800. The middle period extends from 1100 to 1500.
As a rule the medial mutation of the tenues and mediae is not denoted in O. Welsh. Intervocalic g is sometimes retained but generally it has disappeared, whilst after r and l it is still written. In the course of the 9th century initial w (v) becomes gu (later gw). As the O. Welsh documents consist almost entirely of isolated words, we know scarcely anything about the morphology of the language during this period. To the middle period belong the ancient poems from the Black Book of Carmarthen, but the language of these compositions is evidently much older than the date of the manuscript (12th century), as it preserves a number of very archaic features. Other important sources of information for this period are the O. Welsh Laws contained in a MS. of the 12th century. To a somewhat later date belong the Mabinogion (14th century MS.), and the prose versions of French romances published by R. Williams (15th century). In Middle Welsh the consonant mutations are in general denoted in writing, though not consistently, and from this period dates the introduction of w and y (O.W. u, i) to denote vowel sounds. The symbol ll to denote a voiceless l was already employed in Mid. W. but rh (= voiceless r), dd (= Eng. th in “thou”) and f (= v) either do not appear or only become regular during the modern period In Mod. W. the orthography is regularized and does not differ materially from that of the late medieval documents. In O.W. the old stress on the final syllable (the historical penult) appears to have been preserved, but during the middle period the accent was shifted to the penult. In consequence of this change aw (< ā) in final syllables is reduced to o in Mod. W., e.g. Mid. W. pechawt < Lat. peccātum, Mod. W. pechod.
The comparative wealth of inflection preserved by O. Ir. has almost entirely disappeared in Welsh. There are only the faintest traces of the case forms, the dual and the neuter gender. Compared with the Irish nominal declension according to -o- (-jo-), -ā-, -i-, -u-, -s-, guttural, dental and nasal stems, Welsh only distinguishes the nom. sing. and plur., the latter sometimes retaining an old formation. Thus masc. -o- stems show palatal modification, e.g. corn, “horn,” plur. cyrn < *kornī; the plural ending of -u- stems, O. Gaulish -oves, gives O.W. -ou, Mid. W. -eu, Mod. W. -au, e.g. penneu, “heads.” The termination -ones of the -n- stems appears as -on. The infixation of pronominal objects between a verbal particle and the verb itself continues in use down to the present day as in Breton. In the third person sing. of the pres. ind. there are instances in the oldest Welsh of the peculiar alternation between orthotonic and absolute forms which characterize the Irish paradigms, e.g. pereid, “it endures,” but ny phara. The several types of conjugation represented in Irish have become obscured, traces remaining only in the endings of the third sing. of the pres. ind., the pret. ind. (Mid. W. -as, -es, -is) and the pret. passive (Mid. W. -at, -et, -it). The verb system of Welsh comprises the following tenses: indic. present (also used as future), imperative, imperfect, preterite (in Mid. W. forms with s have become prevalent as in Irish, but forms corresponding to the Irish preterites in t or with reduplication or unreduplicated with long vowel are not infrequent in the early poetry), pluperfect (a new formation), pres. and pret. passive. In the subj. early W. distinguishes pres. and past, but the latter comes to be replaced by the pluperfect indicative. The sign of the subj. is -h- < s, which reminds one of the Irish s-subj., though the formation is somewhat different. There are also traces of a future formation containing h < s. (See also under [Wales].)
We have seen already that Wales began to exist as a separate entity roughly at the end of the 6th and beginning of the 7th centuries. In the second half of the 8th century the Welsh were confined in pretty much their present limits by History and extent. Offa, king of Mercia, who constructed the Dyke going by his name, which has approximately remained the political boundary between England and Wales ever since. From this time onwards the bitter feeling against England which we find expressed in the fervid compositions of Iolo Goch and other political bards served to prevent any serious inroads of English on Welsh-speaking territory. With the advent of the Tudors, however, there came a great change. Henry VII. owed his throne in large measure to the support he had received from Wales and he prided himself on his Welsh ancestry. A consequence of this was that throughout the 16th century Wales received exceptionally favourable treatment at the hands of the English sovereign and parliament. In 1562 a decree was issued ordering a translation of the Bible to be made into Welsh. All this could naturally not be without effect on the attitude of the leaders of the people towards England. The change is already apparent in the poems of Lewis Glyn Cothi and others. And the striking difference in the manner in which the Reformation was regarded in Ireland and Wales is worthy of remark. During the Stuart wars the Welsh nobles fought invariably on the Royalist side, and there is plenty of other evidence that the aristocracy of Wales was becoming thoroughly anglicized both in sentiment and language. At the same time the practice of the Tudors was reversed in many particulars. Thus it became the custom to appoint Englishmen ignorant of the national language to the Welsh bishoprics. In this manner it is not a matter for surprise that a feeling of estrangement should grow up between the bulk of the population, who only knew Welsh, and the clergy and nobles, their intellectual leaders. The neglect of the national language is evident from the large number of English words which have even crept into such classical works as Prichard’s Canwyll y Cymry and Ellis Wynn’s Gweledigaethau y Bardd Cwsg. It is stated that, of the 269 works published by Welshmen between 1546 and 1644, 44 were in Latin, 184 in English and only 41 in Welsh, and of these 37 consist of works of piety. Thus at the beginning of the 18th century there seemed a fair chance that Welsh would soon become extinct like Cornish.
An extraordinary change was brought about by the Methodist movement in Wales. The preachers, in order to get hold of the masses, addressed them in the vernacular, and their efforts were crowned with enormous success. At the same time a minister of the Established Church, Griffith Jones, went about Wales establishing lay schools to which young and old might come to learn to read the Welsh Bible. Between 1737 and 1761 3395 such schools sprang up, at which no fewer than 158,238 persons of all ages learned to read their native language. After Griffith Jones’s death this work was carried on by others, notably by Charles of Bala (1755-1814), who passed over to Calvinistic Methodism and whose schools were transformed after the model of the Sunday schools instituted in 1782 by Robert Raikes. Charles of Bala was largely instrumental in the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and Wales was provided with 100,000 copies of the Bible and Testament at very moderate prices. Bishop’s Morgan’s version of the Scriptures made in 1588 (final revision 1620) represents the speech of North Wales which had remained more or less free from English influence, so that the language of the Welsh Bible is rightly regarded as the literary model. Three-fourths of the inhabitants of Wales belong to the various Nonconformist sects, and therefore pass almost without exception through the Sunday school, where they are drilled in its sole object of study, the Welsh Bible.
With the increasing employment of Welsh owing to the Nonconformist movement there was also awakened a new interest in the past history of the principality. A society calling itself the Cymdeithas y Cymmrodorion was founded in London in 1751, and during the succeeding half-century two periodicals exclusively in Welsh were started, the one, Trysorfa y Gwybodaeth, in 1770, the other, Cylchgrawn Cymraeg, in 1793. The year 1792 witnessed the creation of an important society, the Cymdeithas y Cymreigyddion, in London, in which the moving spirits were William Owen (Pughe), Owen Jones and Edward Williams. The results of their indefatigable search for ancient Welsh manuscripts were published in three volumes under the title Myvyrian Archaiology (London, 1801-1807). Owen further published an edition of the greatest medieval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, and also the first copious dictionary. But this was not all. In Goronwy Owen (1722-1769) a poet had arisen whose works could stand comparison with the compositions of the medieval writers, and it was owing to the efforts of the three men above mentioned that the national Eisteddfod (= session, from eistedd, “to sit”) was revived. The origin of these literary festivals is shrouded in obscurity. It is recorded that a S. Welsh prince, Gruffydd ap Rhys, held a festival lasting forty days in 1135 to commemorate a victorious campaign at which poets and minstrels competed for gifts and other rewards. Gruffydd’s son Rhys ap Gruffydd is reported to have instituted a similar contest in 1176, at which the successful competitors received a chair whilst the others were given presents. It would seem that after the loss of Welsh independence a carefully graded order and a system of jealously guarded rules came into existence. Similar national festivals were held under royal patronage under Henry VIII. in 1523 and again under Elizabeth in 1568. From 1568 until 1819 no general eisteddfod for all Wales was held. Since 1819 the national festival has been held annually and every little town has its own local celebration. Hence the Nonconformist Sunday school, the pulpit and the eisteddfod may be regarded as the most potent factors in resisting the inroads of English. The whole question of the vitality of Welsh and what may be called the political and social history of the language is treated in great detail by H. Zimmer, “Der Pan-Keltismus in Gross-britannien und Irland,” i., in Preussische Jahrbücher, vol. xcii. (1898). In elementary schools in Wales the use of Welsh has been permitted since 1893.